Clint Burgess

We ran a program at my last company and were able to get about 125 interviews with buyers per year. Our tips were: * Timing is critical. Reach out right after the deal closes. Immediately. Every day lowers your chance of getting an interview. If you can, build some automation from your CRM (we created a trigger from Salesforce that would notify us the minute a deal was closed). If you wait until after the implementation, they will be biased by their implementation experience (good or bad). The goal of win/loss needs to be to learn about the buyer journey. You can always run a second (shorter) interview after implementation. * The sales rep should be the one sending the email. You can provide them a template for them, but people will respond better to someone they know * The exception to the above is if it was a negative experience. Then you need a third-party to reach out. Maybe even mention "I know you may not want to speak to [XYZ], but we want to help them improve." * Subject line should ask for them to share their perspective, advice, feedback. Make them feel like they are contributing something. * Mention the gift card amount in the subject line. I start with $100 and go up to $150 or $200 from there in follow-up emails. You can try and do $50 as a thank you, but you'll have less success.

I'm glad you asked about MVP, because I tried to boil the WHOLE ocean and build a massive VoC program a few years ago. We tried to collect every piece of information that anyone in the company was collecting from the market. It was way too ambitious and my CEO asked us to stop doing it after a summer of work. That was a huge failure, but going back to basics and building a win/loss program was the best choice for me. I mapped out the 12 areas of VoC that we eventually wanted to cover (e.g. customer feedback from reviews sites, data from churned customers, product usage data, analyst feedback, etc) and then just picked 1 area every quarter or two to focus on. I honestly spent an entire year just doing win/loss, but it got tons of traction and we were able to move on to another area because we got so much buy-in. It was the most popular channel we had. The most important advice I ever received: a VoC program needs to be actionable. Start with the end in mind. Are you trying to enrich marketing campaigns? Provide input into the roadmap? Improve CSAT or win rates? Build the program that fits your outcome. Then, make sure that the goal of the program is not insights, but action. Identify in advance the team that is going to use the data, and build the program in a way that they can easily pull the data from your source. You don't want to be stuck doing "roadshows" around the company to train everyone on the insights. If win/loss is an area you want to start with, I actually just wrote about this last week in a Linkedin article because I wanted to get it on paper: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/clintburgess_the-most-impactful-move-of-my-career-started-activity-7227440015130120192-g35O?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop